A Study Of Nominal Stance Construction In Academic Writing

The traditional idea that academic writing is a subjective and impersonal sort of discourse has been superseded by the view that academic writing is a dynamic form of textual interaction, in which not only research findings are presented but also writer’s stance is claimed. For the last decades, features and functions conveyed by authorial stance in academic writing has drawn considerable attention. Nevertheless, a relatively overlooked device of stance constructing is through the noun complement structure, which allows writers to foreground attitude and present an explicit statement of evaluation towards the proposition introduced in the complement clause.The present study investigates this structure as a nominal stance construction,which is bound up with writers’ proficient academic writing ability. The date collected for this study consists of three subsets: 30 published Material science research articles written by natives, 30 published Applied linguistic research articles written by natives,and 30 published Applied linguistic research articles written by Chinese. Through analyses between articles from different disciplines and cultures, this study explores the use of this stance construction in the form of: “N+be-clause”, “N-clause” and“N+prep+complement”.By adopting a new rhetorically based classification of stance nouns, the present study shows that: 1). The soft science field—Applied linguistic depends far more on the nominal stance construction to express stance than the hard science field —Material science; furthermore there is considerable variation in the way it is used to develop arguments in the two disciplines, which is a reflection of disciplinary difference over knowing mode and knowledge construction. 2). L2 writers usesignificantly fewer instances of this construction than their native counterparts;moreover, due to the Chinese language convention and less proficiency in English language use, there exists considerable variation in the way it is used in L2 and L1writers’ writing.The findings of this study can provide teachers and students some reference for teaching and writing academic discourse. Noun complement structure is a powerful nominal stance construction which affords writers with opportunities to front-load their stance towards the proposition explained in the complement structure.Furthermore, the different preference in stance expressing exhibited in this study should be taken into consideration in practice.